I have spent most of my life listening to music without giving much thought to the division of labour behind it.
A song came on the radio. Someone sang it. The voice and the song fused together so completely that I assumed they had arrived in the world as a single unit.
This week, I learned two things that complicated that assumption.
The first was about Irving Berlin.
Before Berlin became one of the dominant figures in American popular music, songs were commonly created through a partnership. One person composed the music. Another wrote the lyrics. The finished song then travelled onward to the person who would perform it.
Berlin increasingly did both. By 1913, he was writing melodies for his own lyrics, eventually producing more than a thousand songs, including “White Christmas,” “Cheek to Cheek,” “Puttin’ on the Ritz” and “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
Words and music, coming from the same mind.
The second thing I learned was about the Beatles.
Before their arrival, the machinery of popular music was still largely divided. Professional songwriters wrote the songs. Singers and groups recorded them. Publishers, producers and record labels moved everything along the conveyor belt.
The Brill Building in New York was perhaps the most famous version of this system. Writers including Carole King, Gerry Goffin, Burt Bacharach, Hal David, Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann went to work and wrote hits for other people to sing.
Then John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing the songs the Beatles performed.
They were not the first musicians to write their own material. Buddy Holly and the Crickets had already provided a powerful model for the self-contained group, and Paul McCartney later spoke openly about Holly’s influence. But the Beatles brought the idea to a scale that changed the expectations placed on nearly every band that followed. TeachRock describes them as ushering in a new era of artists who wrote their own songs.
The songwriter had stepped onto the stage.
The song used to have departments
There is something charmingly industrial about the old system.
A lyricist had a title or a clever phrase. A composer found the melody. An arranger gave it shape. A singer supplied the voice. With luck, chemistry and a considerable amount of cigarette smoke, a standard emerged.
It resembled a newsroom or an advertising agency. Everyone had a role.
This does not make the work less creative. Collaboration produced some of the finest songs ever written. George Gershwin worked with his brother Ira. Richard Rodgers worked with Lorenz Hart and later Oscar Hammerstein. Elton John has spent much of his career writing music for Bernie Taupin’s lyrics.
There is no moral superiority in doing everything yourself. This will come as a relief to anyone who has ever tried to design their own website.
Still, Irving Berlin represented something unusual.
He shortened the distance between the thought and the finished song.
The person who knew what the words meant also heard the melody that should carry them.
This becomes even more remarkable when you learn that Berlin had almost no formal musical training. He worked instinctively, largely in the key of F-sharp, eventually using a specially designed transposing piano to hear his melodies in other keys. He dictated music to secretaries and arrangers who could translate what he heard into formal notation.
He could not work in the approved way, so he built a system around the way his mind worked.
I found this detail almost as interesting as the songs.
There is a tendency to imagine mastery as fluency in every technical aspect of a craft. Berlin’s genius seems to have involved knowing precisely which parts required his gift and which parts could be entrusted to someone else.
I would like to say this is how I approach my own work.
In reality, I have spent forty minutes trying to move a photograph three millimetres to the left.
Then the performers began speaking for themselves
The Beatles made a different kind of connection.
They joined the writing of the song to the people performing it.
When Lennon sang a Lennon song, or McCartney sang one he had largely written, listeners were not simply hearing an interpretation. They were hearing the person who had first imagined it.
The difference can be subtle.
Frank Sinatra did not write “My Way.” Aretha Franklin did not write “Respect.” Whitney Houston did not write “I Will Always Love You.”
No reasonable person would argue that these performances lack authenticity. A great performer can enter someone else’s song and occupy it so fully that ownership becomes beside the point.
But when performers write their own material, we listen differently.
We search for autobiography.
We assume the first person is really the first person.
We read interviews, examine timelines and decide that a song must be about a particular marriage, betrayal or afternoon in Surrey.
The songwriter-performer created a new kind of intimacy, even when that intimacy was partly constructed.
The singer was no longer simply delivering the message.
The singer appeared to be the message.
We now expect the whole factory to fit inside one person
The model that once seemed revolutionary has become an expectation.
We want musicians to write their songs. Authors are expected to build their platforms. Artists document their process. Small-business owners become photographers, publicists and the unfortunate person who must remember the password to Mailchimp.
The distance between maker and audience has become very short.
This has produced extraordinary freedom.
A writer no longer needs a newspaper column to reach readers. A musician can record a song in a bedroom and distribute it around the world. A painter can show work without first persuading a gallery owner to return an email.
It has also turned the modern creator into a small, chronically underfunded conglomerate.
You make the thing.
Then you package the thing.
Then you explain the thing in a video, preferably while appearing relaxed and well lit.
I am writing this essay, but I will also choose its photograph, load it onto my website, write the description, check how it looks on a phone and send it out to the people who have subscribed.
Irving Berlin had musical secretaries.
I have repeatedly locked myself out of Canva.
Progress is uneven.
Creativity has always moved between solitude and collaboration
The history of the popular song is not a straight march towards the solitary genius.
Today’s biggest songs can have long lists of writers and producers. Songwriting camps have returned popular music to something resembling a creative workshop. Someone arrives with a beat. Someone else has a chorus. Another person changes one word and receives a percentage.
The factory never really disappeared.
It changed shape.
Perhaps that is what interested me most about these two pieces of musical history. Berlin and the Beatles did not prove that one way of making art was better.
They changed what audiences believed was possible.
Berlin showed that words and music could emerge from one sensibility.
Lennon and McCartney helped establish the idea that the people standing at the microphone could also be the people who had something to say.
Each removed a layer between the original impulse and the audience.
That matters because every layer changes the work.
Sometimes collaboration improves an idea. A skilled editor, producer or performer sees what the creator cannot. Other times, each handoff sands away something strange and personal until the work is polished, professional and difficult to remember.
The trick is knowing when another voice will deepen the work and when it will merely make it more acceptable.
I am still working that out.
Most of us are.
Listen to the credits
I have started looking up who wrote the songs I love.
The discoveries are often surprising.
A voice I had associated with one singer turns out to have begun in the mind of someone else. A deeply personal song has four writers. A song that sounds effortless passed through a small municipal government of producers, arrangers and engineers before reaching my kitchen.
It does not diminish the music.
It makes the music larger.
A song is sometimes one person speaking directly into the world.
Sometimes it is a chain of people, each carrying it a little farther.
And sometimes, if you are Irving Berlin or the Beatles, you alter the chain itself.
The rest of us listen without noticing that the rules have changed.